Falling For The Stars: A Stunt Gal’s Tattle Tales
A Memoir by Lisa Loving Dalton
As described in her memoir ‘Falling For The Stars: A Stunt Gal’s Tattle Tales’, Lisa Loving Dalton talks about her life as an actor and stuntwoman, on Big Blend Radio.
Lisa Loving Dalton spent years working with or stunt doubling for a galaxy of celebrity stars including Madonna, Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Katherine Hepburn, Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, Darryl Hannah, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Williams, Robert Downey Jr., Liam Neeson, Cher and more.
Yet, what stands out in her new book Falling For The Stars: A Stunt Gal’s Tattle Tales is the indomitable spirit she assayed, despite the extraordinary price she paid for her stellar career-including misogyny, a miscarriage, and a life-long back injury. And each juicy story she relays in her fascinating chronicle, brings home an important life lesson for the reader-one that she learned the hard way.
Beginning as a naïve, insecure actress, trying to use extra work and stunts as a way into the motion picture industry firmament, Dalton rises to become one of the top stunt professionals on the East Coast, ultimately reaping the economic rewards and the ego gratification-while denying her true desire to act full time. Dalton appeared in more than 200 films, television shows and commercials in New York, Hollywood and Texas, including work in Ghostbusters, Money Pit, Crocodile Dundee, Married to the Mob, FX, Legal Eagles, and Splash on the big screen and ER, HBO’s Carnivale, Dr. Quinn and Melrose Place among her many TV credits.
Yet, Falling For The Stars –already an Amazon #1 bestseller– also provides a magical behind-the-scenes look at the stars and movie making through the eyes of a woman who went toe-to-toe with the Hollywood elite, or at least walked in their stunt shoes. She knows first-hand the caring and humanity of such luminaries as Streep, Redford and Cher.
Dalton reveals what it took to hang over cliffs, get hit by a moving car, drop from five stories up, dodge an avenue of speeding cars, and to ignore the Universe’s more gentle prompts that it was time to quit and follow her passion into acting fulltime or teaching acting. The resulting career-ending spinal injury has a story of its own, how she researched medical and alternative paths that form the heart of what she shares with the world today. She is now certified in NLP, Hypnosis, and Neurological Repatterning–ways she learned to heal.
With humor and candor, Dalton inspires the reader to rise above one’s fears and limitations and go for the gusto. In her book, it is very clear that she knows full well that tomorrow is promised to no one and there is no gift greater than the present. And the present is what you make of it by finding the hidden gifts. Today, she helps actors burnish their gifts by performing and teaching acting around the world.
From a bullied, dyslexic, messy, freckle-faced, klutzy pixie, Lisa Loving Dalton grew into a statuesque and skillful stuntwoman, actor, director, teacher, author, filmmaker, leadership and life coach, and ceremonial minister. Always seeking and finding the silver lining, she has made the most of whatever life threw at her. She says, “I spill stuff, trip and drip all of the time so I made a career out of it. My advice: Embrace what is as perfect.” Visit www.LisaDalton.com.
